Publisher’s Description

You Can Catch A Good Human With A Bad Hamburger

Proverbs For Monsters is an omnibus of the best writing to date by one of the most offbeat and humorous writers working in the horror genre today, Michael A. Arnzen. Hand picked by the author, these are the stories, “flash fictions,” and poems most cherished by readers, most enjoyed at live performances, most celebrated by editors of year’s best collections, and most recommended for literary awards from across his career.

An Infant Vampire Bites Hardest

In Proverbs For Monsters you’ll get advice for growing your own man-eating plant. You’ll ride the movies of Exorcystland — the scariest amusement park ever created. You’ll attend a bizarre grade school for assassins. You’ll meet a dentist with a very disturbing collection of baby teeth. You’ll encounter strange children — from the boy who carries his heart in a metal case attached to his chest to the girl who is completely encased in the carapace of her own giant scab. You’ll ride a diseased elephant and witness the death of the last vampire and learn more than ever you wanted to know about a perpetual embalming machine. You’ll wince and laugh and wince again.

Fortune Favors the Cleaver

Whether or not you have read Michael Arnzen before or are already a fan of his gleefully twisted imagination, you’re in for a very dark treat with this generous collection of thirty stories and thirty poems, many of them impossible-to-find or never seen before. Proverbs For Monsters offers the most delightful and disturbing retrospective of this acclaimed author’s career.

Praise

WINNER of the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection

“Arnzen takes his readers on a guided tour of insanity and the macabre, with a few moments of touching grace combined with repulsive terror. This collection gives the reader a chance to watch Arnzen’s growth as a writer over nearly two decades. And, if anything, those seventeen years have made him better than ever….Proverbs for Monsters does not disappoint…this book serves to document the evolution of a great writer.” — Scott Johnson, Dread Central

“A diverse, amusing, and uniformly well written selection….Arnzen will have broad general appeal, and many of his stories are excellent…well worth your while and deserves to be an award contender.” — Don D’Ammassa, Critical Mass

Proverbs for Monsters
The Scab
Unhinged
Not the Reaper
Rigormarole
Fuzzy Bunnies
Driving the Sick Elephant
Kids Watch in Horror as Clown Chokes to Death on Balloon!
Wicked Wickets
Brazilian Night
Writhe
Slay Pen
grenemean
Those Who Landed, Surprised to Discover that Zombies had Taken Over the Planet
Halloween Costumes I Wish I Would Have Seen
Boy’s Heart is on the Outside of His Body
Laps
Six Short Films About Chauncey the Serial Killer
muscle boy
T-shirt Twirling Red Under Black Tires
Everfoetal
Woman, 36, Raped by Teen She Saved from Drowning
the oral surgeon removes his mask
The Rub
Zombeanie Babies
The Gentlest Monster
Nightmarried
In the Box
Needle Baby
Resuscitation
Woman Marries a Shark
Tip Sheet Rejected by Writer’s Digest
Heartfelt
Why Zombies Lumber

Excerpt

Here’s the table of contents and a sample short story (“How to Grow a Man-Eating Plant”) provided by Dark Regions for your previewing pleasure (visit scribd.com, if for some reason you can’t read the window below):

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Press & Praise

With Play Dead, Arnzen has created a masterpiece of eloquent depravity. It features all of the sins of Vegas, slathering on heaping portions of insane greed, savage sex, irredeemable blasphemy, and skull-crunching violence. You’ll get sucked in on the first page, and won’t put the book down until you reach the breathless finale.